With the media records and court transcripts of major child sexual exploitation (CSE) convictions in England, on which the Network Map relies, there can be no dispute that these networks (predominately Pakistani Kashmiri) are heavily reliant on close-kin biradari networks – specifically brothers and cousins.

The phenomenon is not new and nor is it entirely unrecognised. Last year, I wrote a piece which referred to a paper written in 2024 by academic Patrick Nash who remarked that these networks were “one of the most under-appreciated threats to democratic governments in the 21st century”.

The issue was picked up a year later by Matthew Syed in the Sunday Times which I reviewed at the time, when Syed explicitly highlighted that roughly “two thirds of suspects offended within groups” that were built entirely on pre-existing relationships, predominantly consisting of brothers and cousins.

Much of the information is in the public domain and a direct review of major UK conviction records identifies numerous prominent cases where multiple family members were jailed together as co-conspirators.

These include the grooming ring in Rotherham, which is the most notorious and heavily documented example of a familial core operating, where a single family lineage, comprising three brothers – Arshid Hussain, Basharat Hussain, and Bannaras Hussain – sat at the absolute centre of the abuse network.

A secondary wave of trials saw another brother from the exact same family – Sageer Hussain – convicted and jailed alongside 10 other co-defendants, bringing the total number of brothers running that specific ring to four.

Read more: Policing: a cloak of invisibility